1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates to management: of a multi-access environment, and more particularly to bandwidth management for virus infected user equipment uplink flows in a multi-access network under bandwidth constraints.
2. Description of Related Art
Computer viruses are executable files or attachments often hidden or disguised as legitimate files or messages. More precisely, computer viruses include any form of self-replicating computer code which can be stored, disseminated, and directly or indirectly executed by unsuspecting hosts. Viruses can travel between machines over network connections or via infected media and cause malicious and sometimes destructive results. Viruses can be executable program or macro code disguised as application programs, functions, macros, electronic mail attachments, and even applets and hypertext links.
The earliest computer viruses infected boot sectors and files. Over time, computer viruses evolved into numerous types, including cavity, cluster, companion, direct action, encrypting, multipartite, mutating, polymorphic, overwriting, self-garbling, and stealth viruses. Recently, macro viruses have become popular. These viruses are written as scripts in macro programming languages and are attached to documents and electronic mail attachments. Other virus types have been developed for other hardware types, e.g. for cell phones. (Any complex programmable system, which can send and receive files is a prospect for virus infection.)
Historically, anti-virus solutions have reflected the sophistication of the viruses being combated. The first anti-virus solutions were stand-alone programs for identifying and disabling viruses. Eventually, anti-virus solutions grew to include special purpose functions and parameterized variables that could be stored in data files read by the anti-virus engine. Over time, the special purpose functions evolved into specialized anti-virus languages for defining virus scanning and cleaning, including removal and disablement, instructions.
Wireless communications present further challenges. Typically, radio bandwidth is a multi-access resource shared among multiple users. A recent study of THETA company's VirusGuardMUX monitoring of multi GPRS networks shows that virus contamination infected about 30% of data flow. This not only wastes precious GPRS bandwidth, but also can lead to customer dissatisfaction at higher charges (in a system where charges are traffic based).
Current firewall techniques and secured exchange technology provide solutions in virus detection and filtering. Most important among those techniques are filtering methods, Access Control List (ACL), and network address re-mapping, etc, In IPv6 the IPSec protocol also became mandatory, adding features to enforce network security. (IPSec protocol also works in IPv4, but is optional.) Because IPSec introduces authentication and encryption mechanism to implement identification authentication at the network layer, it guarantees the integrity and privacy and hence the security in the network layer.
The virus types found in wireless devices are mainly layer seven application virus types (and also layer three worm virus). They are normally carried over GTP-U protocol. The traditional firewall technology basically filters out virus on the downlink flow. However, it does not control the virus flows on the uplink. Consequently, a great percentage of precious uplink bandwidth was wasted on the transmission of virus infected flows on the uplink before they can be detected.
Viruses are not the only type of malicious software, or “malware.” As internet usage has evolved, a variety of malware types has appeared, not all of which may be viruses in the narrowest sense. However, many different types can cause a useless burden on bandwidth. For example, viruses will send out many copies of themselves, but other kinds of malware may send spam (unsolicited advertising) to multiple recipients, or may recruit host computers to participate in a DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Services) attack.